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In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.

Leaders from more than 20 major nations announced Thursday (see the Communiqué) that they would make available an additional $1 trillion through the International Monetary Fund and other institutions to help developing countries cope with the global economic crisis.

The outcome of today’s G20 summit has become even more critical for developing countries as the World Bank revised the 2009 forecast for GDP growth in the developing world to 2.1 percent down from 5.8 percent in 2008. But a draft copy of the G20 communiqué published by the Financial Times could go farther in its commitment to help the world’s most vulnerable countries.

The Forbes Billionaire list published yesterday is a powerful sign of how fast the world is changing, in two worrying respects: growing inequality in the world, and the failure of the international financial institutions to adjust to the increased economic importance of emerging market economies. According to Forbes:

Here are Donald Rumsfeld, James Wolfensohn and somebody else agreeing on something. Guess who recently said the following:
1. "But most (global) institutions are rickety relics of a sixty-year-old worldview, a product of the way the planet looked at the end of World War II or the dynamics that shaped it during the cold war era."

The IMF's 2007 World Economic Outlook has a chapter on inequality and globalization (Chapter 4), which concludes that globalization in the last two decades has contributed to increased inequality in most countries. Bravo to the IMF for daring to move, on globalization, from apparent unencumbered globaphile to concerned realist!

IMF Managing Director Rodrigo de Rato promised in a speech at the Center this week that the planned increase in voice and representation of developing countries at the IMF would cover the poorest members - most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa - and not just the “emerging market economies”.